The second day of the CCWI conference

CCWI (Computing and Control in the Water Industry) has always been an important conference for KWR and in particular for its water infrastructure team. On Tuesday, Dragan kicked off the day with a keynote on whether or not ‘Going Dutch’ is a wise decision regarding drinking water supply and water management. Although both countries offer a high level of service to the customer, there are also significant differences. For example, how the sector is organised: public (NL) or private (UK).

The Dutch sector is performing better in essential areas, such as the low leakage rate, which can hardly be believed by our western neighbours, and the failure to add chlorine as a disinfectant for distributed drinking water. Dragan reinforced his message by wearing a bright orange tie during the presentation. Oliver Grievson engaged the audience with another issue, namely what Water 4.0 means. Not entirely surprising in his story was the message that data quality and proper operation and maintenance of the physical infrastructure – including sensors! – is a fundamental prerequisite for running smart water applications (‘smart water’) for decision support, visualisation, analysis and real-time control. After all, in this case, ‘garbage in’ means ‘garbage out’.

Dragan kicked off the day with a keynote on whether or not ‘Going Dutch’ is a wise decision regarding drinking water supply and water management.

The main subjects of the conference

The rest of the day was scheduled with sessions on modelling and control of pipeline networks, modelling of (waste) water treatment, sustainability and resilience of water infrastructure, asset management and even a course for ‘early career researchers’. Modelling and optimisation of pipeline networks were the main subjects of the conference. In the theme of sustainability, ‘serious games’ and ‘gamification’ were the keywords that stood out.

Worth mentioning is the work of Liljana Marjanovic and others in the European POWER project on the active involvement of citizens via apps for submitting ideas for solving water-related problems. Joost van Summeren talked about Aquarellus and smart use of sensor networks.

Algorithm for energy management

I presented the first results of a smart algorithm for energy management in the Power-to-X project. Only one session was about water treatment, in particular modelling and decision support for wastewater treatment. A notable presentation was on an extensive decision support tool for the removal of 15 micropollutants from various water treatment processes. In the afternoon, excursions were organised and the day was closed with a dinner in which a jazz band completed the decor.